Danbury Mayor Highlights Virtual Restaurant Week + City COVID Cases

You may have seen Danbury Mayor Joe Cavo recently leaving a local restaurant with some take out, what's up with that?

Also this week he talks about a slight uptick in COVID-19 cases in Danbury, and how does he feel about restrictions being lifted.

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So we see COVID-19 cases dropping in a lot of places around Connecticut and New York State, but not in Danbury. What can you tell us about these latest numbers?

"Overall numbers have declined throughout the state, but in the Fairfield County area, those numbers seem to be a bit higher for some reason. I don't know if it's because of our proximity to New York City, but we've come down to a level where our positivity rate is about 25 or 26 per hundred thousand people. It was a little bit lower than that a few weeks ago, so we just want to keep encouraging people to follow the guidance. As the spring gets here, things should start really turning the corner for us, plus we've had a very successful vaccine roll out which has been going really well here in Danbury. The Danbury Health Department along with all the other medical organizations that are responsible have been doing a great job getting as many vaccines as we can get and getting them into peoples arms."

There have been a lot of restrictions lifted across the state, but that makes me a little nervous. How do you feel about that in regard to what's happening in the city?

"We are actually opening City Hall to the public again this week by appointment only. We will also be here in the hybrid model with 50 percent of the staff here and 50 percent working from home, and then next week those two shifts will flip. We're easing into things and watching the numbers, this way if something happens and if we see more cases as we're easing, then we can roll back a notch. But if not, hopefully if things go well in a month or so we can start to roll ahead another notch and ease things even more."

You know I care about you Joe, but how is your cholesterol level? I noticed on Facebook that you're hitting up all these take out places, why is that?

"Actually we're trying to get that virtual restaurant notice out to everybody. We want people to go out and use local businesses to shop local. This month we're working on all of our restaurants in Danbury, trying to keep them all going during the pandemic so we're showing that we've been doing our part, doing take out and it's been going pretty well. After a month of take-out, next month it's going to have to be virtual gym or Jenny Craig month...lol."

So I have to ask you, you're the Mayor of the City, do you actually have to pay for the take-out? Don't you get a lot of freebies?

"I definitely have to pay, no gifts allowed. It just keeps things neater and cleaner. I get paid for this job and I wouldn't expect anyone to give me anything, so we pay for everything."

The city of Danbury posted to their Facebook page highlighting the Mayor's adventure to local restaurants to get takeout. You can see their virtual restaurant week here: